Online Sequencer Forums

Introduction

One of the things I've been most curious about on this site is people's composition process. I've always found it interesting what inspires people, how they write, and what goes through their heads when they do so. Some take a more serious approach, using theory and inspiration to make their music, others take an image, word, or memory and try to convey emotion, some have a specific theme in mind or goal, others base it off their title... the list goes on. Point being, everyones method is different.

And every sequence has a story.

If you're comfortable sharing one of your sequences and what inspired it/how you wrote it/what you were thinking at the time, I'd love to hear (and I think other people would too). 

Sharing
Disclaimer: I know around negative two about music theory, so my process might sound really really strange to the experienced users on this site - I'm just creating this thread out of sheer curiosity and I'm sorry if I name anything incorrectly.

I'll start with myself - 

This sequence is named Genesis, and I think this is my best example of how inspiration can get a sequence off the ground.  I get ideas out of the blue - I could be doing work, eating, sleeping, pretty much anything, and I'll get inspired. Sometimes I'll get a melody, sometimes a chord, sometimes a key and a feeling, etc. I'll jot down a few notes if I don't have the time to write a lot, and sometimes I'll dump my ideas in the comment section of a one-note piece :]. As to Genesis, I was lying around on a Sunday morning, and I all of a sudden got hit with a ton of inspiration when I thought of the word Genesis. I started to write, and spent around 7 hours that day sitting at my computer. At the end of 3 days, the sequence, length-wise, was complete. As I was writing, I pictured one person, standing at the edge of a cliff, with the whole world out in front of them. It's dark outside, but it's that moment right before the sun comes up, so you know something big is about to start : )

-> sorry if that made no sense lol

Your turn!
How do you write your music?

i came up with this over morning pancakes

this one  started with only a small motif in the Locrian scale , little by little it got better and better and better. little did i know at the time, this was going to become the best sequence i have ever made.
this definitely is supposed to be a fight in the desert, but against who? maybe one of your allies that has become cursed with some dark magic? or maybe something else entirely? maybe the fight takes place on top of a train car?


i know very well that if i ever make a RPG style video game, or any type of video game that has boss fights in it, this WILL definitely be a theme as one

edit: also, it took almost a whole week to make the song which is the longest i have ever worked on a song

I wanted to rickroll everyone

I was tired

The way I write and make music is like taking a page out of what sounds good and what also has happened in my own life. I try to write music that tells a story about a beginning of trials/tribulations or a happy part that then goes either into a joyful part or a more dark menacing part. So, there are sections with a different meaning behind them. I know that I may not write the best songs, and I know that there way more out there and on OS who are way better than me at writing and composing music. So, I try to do the best I can. My song Reflection's is a song about that. It has parts that are happy and parts that are sad and it goes back and forth like a never-ending reversal of emotion until the slow and peaceful end.

With few exceptions, I never sit down and think "I want to make a song that sounds like this." and then just go make the song.

For me, I guess it's trying to recreate other sounds.  If I hear a sound I like... I dunno, maybe a particular instrument in a song, a machine making a cool noise, whatever... I try to remake it on OS.  I know the sound of our security cameras dinging showed up in one of my most popular sequences.  (I can't unhear it any time I listen to that one).  Anyway, on Alty, I sort of keep an inventory of things as I go along.  Later on, those snippets make it into my finished sequences.

So here's the story behind Viridian Dew
.


One of my coworkers made this.  https://soundcloud.com/numeryc-music/made-of-glass

I liked that sound of the poppy echoey lead and the synths fading in and out.  So I tried to copy it in OS.  That's all my sequence was originally: Scifi and smooth synth with markers. (If you mute the other instruments in measures 1-8, that was all there was to it).  I wanted to add more depth to the scifi so I started trying to figure out what drums had tonal sounds to them.  Clicked around through the Electric Drum Kit and found that the Low Woodblock sounds like a D#, the Claves were at a C, and the Low Conga is a couple microtones off of a A#.  I had already done tonal percussion in here:
 
and wanted to use it again.  It's a cheap way to work in some microtonality and texture without having to do all that PCM stuff you kids are into these days.  Then I moved my song around to a key where those 3 notes were all present, and built it out through measure 16.

Then I linked it in chat for a day or two, until Steggy volunteered to take a look at making it better.  He went in, completely added depth and all kinds of really cool amazing Jonah-style textures I hadn't considered, and a lead.  Also, Steggy did that chord change at 13, the C# Maj.  That's what really blew me away, because I don't write happy songs with major chords.  Even though subtle, this change immediately set the tone for the rest of the project. 

Once I got the sequence back, and a night passed, I woke up knew I wanted to incorporate the vibraphone sound I had come up with in another sample sequence (now deleted).  I didn't know why at the time... but after I put it in place with the existing key and progression, I realized I was accidentally making https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8oqbWrP1QY - I guess my brain put the "C#Maj" + "Rhodes with wah pedal" sounds together while I was sleeping.  Oh well, I guess "Just The Two Of Us" makes sense in a two-person collab anyway. 

I gave it back to Steggy to work on.  He mentioned earlier that he wanted to do an acoustic guitar part in the bridge, so he gave it back to me with that part in there and completed all the way through measure 48.  We needed something to fit in between measure 24 and what is now the acoustic guitar part, so I threw in the night portion using Lopyt's crickets trick (but eq'd and more subtle) from here (measure 19):
  
and tried to give it the feel of a reflective pool. 

When I heard the trombones at 34, that little hint of an angelic chorus sound just felt like we were heading towards something green and bloomy.  I built that out using the choral sounds from here:
.  

So now by this point, the song has a night time and sunrise.

From that point, we sort of organically just started making it more and more Spring-like with each iteration.  It was subconscious, sort of like we were using the ideomotor effect on a ouija board, to inevitably head down this path without either of us setting out to do so.  The sequence took on a life of its own.

I went and sat outside for a while to listen what Spring sounded like.  My wife has a butterfly garden she's been working on for a couple years, like, it's really amazing back there.  30-40 butterflies of all types flying around, birds everywhere.  I wanted the song to sound like being there, so I repurposed the bird sounds from here:
 
and added a subtle cardinal sound at 21 too.

I also added on a throwaway placeholder flourish ending with the piano (and tagged it "ending here lol") and uh, it ended up staying in the final piece.  We each worked on it a few more times, with lots of good detailed communication on Discord.

Steggy cited these three sequences as being influences for his portions:


So yeah, the sequence ended up nothing like I wanted it to at the start, but I think I like the final product.

I can share a bit about days i'd rather forget. The song follows more closely with my 2015-2018 melancholic style and isn't as jazzed up as my recent sequences.

My main inspiration (in regards to the song and my most fundamental style) comes from Irisu Syndrome. Back then, I used to be a little more sentimental and I felt the entire soundtrack resonate with me in a haunting way. It still haunts me a bit today, but it's less noticeable since the game's music is very much incorporated into my style. There's also a chord progression that's loosely pulled away from this song.

I have difficulty associating music with emotional pictures, but the easiest gesture was inspired by this song at the time. There's a comment about someone contemplating suicide by the ocean and I felt that was a sort of emotion I wanted to convey with days. I'm not suicidal myself but drowning is still an interesting and beautiful thought to me.

days i'd rather forget is one of my earliest experiments with frequency chaining and I think it ended up well. The disconnected arpeggios and echoes across the sequence are straight from intuition. I think the extra notes tastefully set up the broken atmosphere I had in my head even though I had no clue what I was doing. I feel that days is one of my polished products that I've felt the most natural in making.

A lot of people also mention that it sounds similar to the Pokemon Diamond OST, however this is completely coincidental.

Ok so, I'm kinda messy with my composing process and most of the time inspiration hits me out of nowhere when I'm not doing anything in particular, or when my brain just comes up with a random melody, but this was a different case with my sequence Pop Culture.

It all started with just a random test that I would never have thought of using, since I got really excited that my old Macbook could run all of OS's sequence settings on google (my Ipad that I was using wasn't as laggy, but couldn't stand volume changes, EQ, and even reverb). This was where I fell in love with the flute, and even though I like its melody in the original, it didn't quite fit in somehow with the newer versions.

Then the second version came. I didn't end up liking this one over time because of the 8-bit triangle, and how the melody was kind of stiff with it. This was when I established that I should make a longer version of the test since I really liked it, and I wanted to add "vocals" and lyrics eventually. I feel like this was the start of where I wanted to make the song more poppy, and go in another direction with it.

This was another failed version where I tried to include the flute; I was getting closer to where I wanted to, but I ended up dropping all of these versions entirely and started from scratch again. I really liked the sound of the pop synth, and I think it definitely deserves the name it has. I'm not sure how I didn't reference these and end up with similar instruments, but I think the final sequence of the four was worth it in the end, even though it seems a little bit lower quality and repetitive compared to my other sequences.

Here's the final product, and where I started to get outside inspiration for the sequence. I was listening to a lot of K-pop at the time, and I have no idea if it shines in there but this was certainly inspired by it. I also wanted it to be a song that one of my original characters helped "create," because he is a songwriter/singer. I also had a lot of ideas if this were to be produced as a music video, which were also drawn from eye-catching K-pop MV's. I even got some inspiration for the comic I was- and still am- working on, and how the universe I made up would work with people from it listening to the song and even watching the MV themselves. As for the lyrics and vocals from earlier, the vocals are present in the flute and s. piano, and I wanted to give the song a generic pop feel, but make the lyrics dark and about some kind of cultural revolution with two extreme sides going on in the history of the universe I created. I feel like this was possibly inspired by the dark practices in the K-pop industry, and how most music production companies don't really allow the singers basic human rights. This "occurrence" also shows up in the MV storyboards and ideas I had, where extreme censorship was present in the world I built, but the character I mentioned changed how censorship would be viewed.

I had a lot of fun with this, and it helped change up the creative flow in my brain, and give me new perspectives on working with a song! It felt as if I was producing Pop Culture with someone, maybe even the character I created. Pushing my creative limits is something I never even really thought about until now, and it was a nice experience going back through and reminiscing with all of the memories that helped me create this piece.

I usually start with a pretty solid idea of a melody, or if not that, I directly take inspiration from a song I liked and use that as a basis for my creations. In some cases, I will directly pull chords or chord progressions from a song and modify them until I get something I like. Other times, I'll have a specific goal I want to work towards. I'll provide examples for each.


With this, I started off making it by taking the chords from Stolen Dance by Milky Chance, moving them to a different key, and shifting them around until I got something interesting. I wanted to make something with a similar feel to that song, and I was satisfied with the end result.


This one came about when I was making a bassline for a completely different song inspired by a video game OST (I forget which track it was specifically.) Turns out, the bass worked vastly better as a melody, so I used it as such and the resulting sequence was very good. Much of the sequences I made around this time have a similar feel, and were heavily inspired by dark cat, Psyqui, Snail's House, and Polyphia.


Last one I'll mention ITT, this one was specifically made for me to push the limits of what I was used to in terms of technicality and get used to more varied transitions, so I focused on incorporating as many things I hadn't used often as possible, such as time signature changes. Turned out alright. Lately, I've been wanting to do make another version with percussion and possibly a wider variety of instruments, so we'll see how that goes.